Unearthing Breece D’J Pancake

I found it, appropriately enough, underground. I was browsing the secondhand bookstore in the basement of my local public library, a dimly lit, low-ceilinged warren where I sometimes feel the need for a miner’s helmet. I ran my hands across the ridged spines of the not-quite-alphabetical paperback fiction—Percy, Proulx, Patterson, all the familiar names—until I came across one that was less familiar: Pancake. “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake.” It was the Owl edition, first published in 1984, with the drab photograph of the tin-roofed Appalachian shacks on the front. Behind the shacks rose misty green mountains, and above those peaks floated a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates comparing the author’s début to Hemingway’s. I’d been hearing about Pancake for years, mostly from other writers. It was a connoisseur’s recommendation, like being given the name of delicious but hard-to-find bourbon from a friend in the liquor trade. You have to try it. I paid my fifty cents, climbed back out into the daylight world, and started reading. On a price-per-word basis, it may be the best money I’ve ever spent on a book.

Pancake’s stories and their characters, though from the nineteen-seventies, felt both immediately recognizable and pertinent to the present moment. Set mostly in the coal country of West Virginia, “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” features a cast of hardscrabble laborers whose lives are circumscribed by failing farms, diminishing economic prospects, and the environmental blight caused by the harvesting of fossil fuels. Not quite Southern and, likewise, neither Eastern or Midwestern, Appalachia is a largely overlooked region in our literary culture. Pancake’s territory does not even qualify as flyover country. A character in the opening story, “Trilobites,” has such little experience of airplanes that the one time he sees the shadow of jetliner he “honest to god” thinks it’s a pterodactyl.

While deeply tied to the details of its Appalachian setting, the book offers a broader portrait of the personal and societal wreckage left behind by mass industrialization. Grim, work-related deaths and ailments abound in Pancake’s fiction: lungs bleed from coal dust; mine gas turns a man “blue as jeans”; another is killed by fragments of metal lodged in his brain. When I heard the news, last month, of the chemical spill that left three hundred thousand West Virginians without usable water for a week, I thought immediately of this sentence from “The Scrapper”: “He could see where the wives had planted flowers, but the plants were all dead or dying from the constant shower of coal dust.” Nearly all of Pancake’s stories share a unity of time, taking place in a matter of hours or days, but they are set against an ever-present awareness of geological time, of the epochs and eras that preceded the present moment. His fictions combine the intimacy and specificity of a Vermeer portrait with the grandeur and fierceness of a Bierstadt panoramic.

These bleak qualities may make Pancake’s stories timely, but it is their compressed artistry and distilled feeling that make them timeless. I read the book with no foreknowledge of Pancake’s work or life—always a welcome experience. On my first pass through, I was reminded of an astonishing variety of other writers. Thematically and structurally, the book owed a lot to “Dubliners” and “Winesburg, Ohio,” but, stylistically, Pancake was fully formed, an uncanny hybrid of dirty realism and Southern gothic. A whole world I didn’t know about was opened up for me. After finishing the book, I would have happily gone spelunking in the library basement for more of Pancake’s work, but there was none. This is Pancake’s only book, originally published in 1979, three years after his death, at the age of twenty-seven, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Like the pedestalled feet of a ruined statue, these twelve stories can only hint at the body of work that might have been produced had he lived. With no more of Pancake’s fiction available, I turned to Thomas E. Douglass’s biography, “A Room Forever” (which includes a selection of Pancake’s letters), and to the handful of essays about him that I could find in print and on the Web. The best of these, Samantha Hunt’s “The Secret Handshake,” which appeared in The Believer, in 2006, is so comprehensive that it should be included as an appendix the next time a new edition of “The Stories” is published. (Before you go looking, be warned: the full text of Hunt’s essay is not available online and the back issue is sold out at the McSweeneys store.)

Pancake was born in 1952, in Charleston, West Virginia, and raised in the town of Milton. That part of the state is known as Chemical Valley because of the many industrial facilities situated there. Pancake’s father, Clarence (known as C.R.), worked for Union Carbide for more than three decades, not including a hiatus to serve in the Second World War. Breece’s mother, Helen, who came from Scotch-Irish stock, was a homemaker and, later, a librarian. It is from her that Breece got his love of books. According to Douglass’s biography, Helen picked the name Breece out of the sports page of the Charleston Gazette the day after her son was born. The surname Pancake is an Anglicized diminution of the German Pfannkuchen. (Breece’s middle initials came years later, from a printer’s error that he allowed to stand.) The author’s unlikely name contrasts sharply with the names of the characters he created: Ottie, Colly, Bus, Bo, Reva, Enoch, Corey, and Skeevy, to list a few. As Hunt notes, those names are one of the prime pleasures of Pancake’s stories. Made up of a single syllable or an iambic pair, they are truncated, anti-poetic names, names that are meant to be shouted in a mine or in a bar. In one story, I briefly mixed up a dog named Lindy and his owner, Buddy.

An accomplished student, Pancake did well in school and went on to West Virginia Wesleyan College and Marshall University. After graduating, he taught English at two military academies before receiving a fellowship to the University of Virginia. There he was mentored by the distinguished trio of John Casey, James Alan McPherson, and Peter Taylor. Though he flourished as a writer during his three years at Virginia, selling stories to The Atlantic and having his work solicited by Daniel Menaker, of The New Yorker, Pancake also endured a number of personal setbacks. His father, who had become an alcoholic, died of complications resulting from multiple sclerosis in 1975. Three weeks later, his closest friend, Matthew Heard, was killed in an automobile accident. And, in 1977, his girlfriend, Emily Miller, bowed to pressure from her well-to-do family and rejected Pancake’s marriage proposal. Like many of the male characters in his work, Pancake dated aspirationally, courting women above his own class. “Her parents have decided I’m not good enough for her,” he wrote to his mother after Emily spurned him. An inaccessible former girlfriend is as much a part of a Pancake story as a dog and gun.

Pancake never felt comfortable in the refined atmosphere of Charlottesville. In a letter home, he described how his landlady asked him to tend bar at a party she was throwing for the English department. “[She] said if I didn’t she’d have to hire a colored, and they don’t mix a good drink. That tells me where I stand as a Hillbilly.” Like his father, Pancake had difficulties with alcohol. He was also depressed about his inability to find a job. Nevertheless, as Douglass writes, the reasons for Pancake’s suicide are far from clear. The circumstances of his death, which followed a sleepwalking incident, are decidedly strange and suggest that he might have been in a state of disorientation. Pancake had a great deal to live for. He’d sold two stories to The Atlantic and an editor at Doubleday had requested a novel from him. The week after Pancake’s death, a letter arrived offering him a seven-month fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Among the other fellows that year were Mary Robison, Jaimy Gordon, and another West Virginian, Jayne Anne Phillips.

Pancake was an obsessive, almost self-flagellating perfectionist when it came to his writing. For a typical story, he did four drafts in longhand and then ten drafts on the typewriter. His teacher John Casey thinks that only four of the twelve stories in the book meet the high standards that Pancake set for himself: “Trilobites,” “Hollow,” “The Mark,” and “In the Dry.” To these, I would add “Time and Again” (a perfect, chilling, slice of the macabre) and “First Day of Winter,” which Peter Orner last year dissected in his Lonely Voice column, on the Rumpus. To give the uninitiated a taste of Pancake’s work, I would like to highlight “Hollow,” which contains many of his recurring themes.

The first half of “Hollow” reads like a country-and-western song rendered into print. The protagonist, Buddy, is a coal miner whose girlfriend, Sally is about to run off with another miner, named Fuller. “I’m tired of livin’ on talk,” she tells him. Buddy arranges to fight Fuller at a bar in town, but when Fuller shows up he has Sally in his car along with Buddy’s dog, Lindy, and his TV. Buddy gets his dog back, but he leaves Sally and the TV with Fuller.

In the second half of the story, Buddy wakes up in his trailer, hungover and bloodied from a fight he can barely remember. He lets his dog in and sees that a pack of wild hounds has had their way with her. To console her, he searches for meat to put in her bowl, but there is none. He feeds Lindy sardines, which the dog throws up. He is enraged. “There was no reason he should have to clean up, no reason he could not have meat, or anything he wanted.” Buddy takes his rifle and goes outside to hunt, killing a doe. Gutting the animal, he discovers that it was pregnant. He kicks the unborn fawn aside and watches it die while he eats the doe’s liver and contemplates calling a strike at the small mine where he works. As in many Pancake stories, the climactic act of violence is a release for frustrations that can find no other means of expression. There is no redemption in the act, however, only confirmation of futility. The dead fawn is both Buddy’s expiring youth and the child he will never have with Sally. The title resonates and the hollows are multiple: the holes in the earth, the hollow of the hill where Buddy lives, the emptiness inside him, and the absence that Sally’s departure leaves in his life.

While displaying many of Pancake’s strengths, the story also shows his most glaring weakness—his portrayal of women. The female characters in these stories are almost always seen in terms of their faithfulness and sexual appeal (or lack thereof). A young waitress in “Trilobites” is described as “jailbait.” The protagonist of “In the Dry” returns home after years away and, encountering a girl he once knew, thinks, “At sixteen she was nothing to look at.… Now he sees her an old maid in a little town.” At times, there is a sophomoric aspect, as in “The Salvation of Me” when a high-schooler taunts his gym teacher about his wife, asking, “if the angle of his dangle was equal to the heat of her meat.” It’s the one facet of Pancake’s work where his youth is on display. Though likely an accurate reflection of the milieu in which his stories are set, there is a lack of sophistication and distance in Pancake’s writing about women. I can’t help feeling that his early death deprived us from seeing a more mature and nuanced approach in later works.

But that early death is also an inextricable part of Pancake’s legend. Near the end of his life, Pancake converted to Catholicism, even going so far as to give the seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee he received from The Atlantic for “Trilobites” to the church to feed the poor. At his core, he was a moral writer. His stories ask again and again how one should behave in hopeless circumstances. It’s not hard to see why Pancake has become a sort of secular saint for some writers. Writing is an act of faith. Writers face endless rejection, constant self-doubt. For many writers, practicing their art requires a vow of poverty or, at the very least, a vow of doing without. Pancake suffered through all of this and more, and yet he was delivered to the afterlife of publication and acclaim.

Nevertheless, Pancake deserves to be more than a writer’s writer. In his stories, objects are constantly being unearthed: fossils and coal from the earth, skeletons and arrowheads from Indian burial grounds. “The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake” is a sharp, flinty object, an arrowhead left behind by a talented and tragic young author. It would be easy to allow his one collection of stories to be buried under the landslide of books published every year. But it’s worth doing a little excavating to dig it up. The past few years have seen late-in-the-day and posthumous revivals of interest in writers such as Renata Adler, Elena Ferrante, and John Williams. Get out your pickaxes. It’s high time for a Pancake revival.

Above: A coal miner in West Virginia; 1967-1980. Photograph by Ed Eckstein/Corbis.

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